National Instruments Presentation: Addressing Multicore Programming Challenges

by Jeff Meisel (LabVIEW Real-time Group Manager), Kamran Shah (LabVIEW Marketing Group Manager)

Tuesday 9 Oct 2007, 10:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

160/1-009 (CERN)

National Instruments presents on 9th October 2007 exclusively for CERN employees a lecture about the topic”How Graphical Tools Simplify the Complexity to Leverage Multicore Processor Architectures”.

Scope
For years, processor manufacturers have been improving the performance of CPUs by increasing clock speed. The latest trend, however, in processor technology is multiple cores. Essentially, this means manufacturers are packing several CPUs on one chip.

Programming applications to run on multicore processors is much tougher than programming for their single-core counterparts. While multiple applications can easily run on different cores, you must meticulously code applications to take advantage of multicore technology. This means that existing applications most likely see little performance increase, if any, when running on a modern multicore machine.

Because is inherently serial in nature, attempting to visualize parallelism in a text-based programming multithreaded piece of code is difficult. On the other hand, by harnessing the graphical nature of NI LabVIEW, coders can easily visualize and program parallel applications. In addition, LabVIEW automatically generates threads for parallel sections of code, so engineers and scientists can spend more time problem solving and less time worrying about low-level implementation of their applications.

Content

• Challenges in leveraging multicore processor technologies;
• Introduction to graphical software tools for multicore processor architectures;
• Structuring and synchronizing parallel code architectures;
• Thread synchronization in multicore architectures;
• Debugging parallel software architectures;
• Programming Real-time target systems leveraging multicore processors.